Everywhere in the world women live longer than men – but this was not always the case. The available data from rich countries shows that women didn’t live longer than men in the 19th century. What’s the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And how is this difference growing as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an absolute conclusion. Although we know that there are behavioral, biological as well as environmental factors that play an integral role in the longevity of women over men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.
We are aware that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn’t due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues that are more intricate. For example, there is evidence that in rich countries the female advantage increased in part because infectious diseases used to affect women disproportionately a century ago, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, ended up raising women’s longevity disproportionately.
Everywhere in the world women tend to live longer than men
The first chart below shows life expectancy at birth for men and women. We can see that every country is over the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her brother.
This chart shows that, although women have an advantage across all countries, تحاميل مهبلية differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the gap is less than half an hour.
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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in developed countries than it is now.
Let’s now look at the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.
First, there’s an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The gap is widening: While the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was extremely small, it has increased substantially with time.
If you select the option “Change country’ on the chart, determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.